Today I am very happy to belong to a political party who has a leader who inspires us. Green Party of Ontario Leader Mike Schreiner has been doing an incredible job even without a seat in the legislature.
Election Finance Reform
Water-Taking Reform
Free the Beer
Between Ontario’s democratic deficit, the wrong headed energy policy, privatizing mania, the affordable housing crisis, the antidemocratic “Green Energy Act, shortsighted transit planing, a inadequate basic income program, isn’t it time we elected some Greens?
“I had failed to see the advantage of having a vote that might leave me after an election a disfranchised voter instead of an unenfranchised woman.” —Catherine Helen Spence
Even before Australian (or any) women had the vote, Catherine Helen Spence understood that a vote that doesn’t count isn’t an improvement on no vote at all.
Family and friends of a Somali refugee who came to Nova Scotia as a child 17 years ago were at Province House Tuesday morning trying to get the Nova Scotia government to intervene in his deportation case.
Abdoul Abdi, 23, will be in Toronto on Wednesday for an Immigration and Review Board hearing where he could be ordered deported from Canada.
“I think it’s unfair that they’re trying to strip him of his permanent resident’s card and that he can’t have health care or work, even now that he has a job,” said his sister Fatuma Abdi.. “He’s trying to better himself but the government is moving him 10 steps back.”
A 2017 prosecution of a California doctor charged with possessing child
pornography revealed that the FBI had been tipped off by a Best Buy
technician the doctor had paid to service his computer; the technician
had searched his computer and then provided evidence to the FBI,
sidestepping the need for the FBI to obtain a warrant.
The trial revealed that this was a routine activity for Best Buy’s
service technicians, who were given cash bonuses by the FBI for
undertaking detailed forensic examinations of customers’ devices without
their knowledge or consent and without any particularized suspicion.
EFF filed a raft of Freedom of Information requests about the practice,
and has published a lengthy analysis of what we know about the Best
Buy/FBI collaboration, and which areas remain murky.
They show that Best Buy and the FBI collaborated for at least a decade,
and confirm that Best Buy technicians were given secret cash bonuses for
rooting around on customers’ computers. FBI agents were given tours of
Best Buy service centers, and engaged in “parallel construction” where
they’d use tips from Best Buy to secure warrants, without revealing to
their investigation subjects that the initial info had come from
technicians who had effectively been deputized by the FBI to conduct
warrantless, suspicionless searches.
At least five people who have spent years sleeping on Vancouver’s streets or in its parks turned down a spot in a brand new apartment development for the homeless because of the level of opposition in the neighbourhood, the property manager says.
“They were afraid because of the protests,” says Julie Roberts, executive director of Community Builders, a non-profit organization that operates the 78-unit temporary housing complex in the south-end neighbourhood of Marpole.
“They weren’t sure if they were going to be safe.”
Manitoba’s children’s advocate will gain new powers next week to work on behalf of more young people and to make more of her findings public.
The Progressive Conservative government says portions of a law passed last year are to take effect March 15.
The changes expand the role of Daphne Penrose beyond child welfare to examine youth services in areas such as education, health and justice.
Another change will allow her to publicly release findings from her investigations into the deaths of children in government care.
The additional powers were recommended in 2013 by the inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, a five-year-old girl who was beaten to death by her mother and mother’s boyfriend after social workers closed her file.
Not what I would consider “voted down” ~ especially in a winner-take-all system that routinely delivers majority governments with minority support.
BC governments don’t need 60% of the vote to form government.
In 2017, Ms Christy Clark’s Liberal MLA’s secured only 43 seats; they needed 44 seats to claim a majority government. Ms. Clark tried very hard to woo Green Party support; had she had succeeded, she could have formed a minority government based on only 40.36% of the votes cast for Liberal MLAs.
The NDP won only 41 seats… but they did it with 40.28%
That’s a difference of only .08% of the votes the parties earned ~ 1,566 votes ~ but it meant a difference of 2 seats.
Meanwhile the BC Green Party won the “balance of responsibility” … they worked out a supply and confidence agreement that allowed the BC NDP to form a minority government.
Here’s hoping they deliver the good people of BC electoral reform. to Proportional Representation!
